Posted
by
BeauHDon Tuesday September 06, 2016 @06:00AM
from the to-be-continued dept.

An anonymous reader writes: A coordinated DDoS attack hit Linode (VPS provider) over the weekend, which the company has described as "catastrophic." The attack targeted the company's Atlanta data center, and was timed for the extended Labor Day weekend when the company had fewer employees on hand to deal with the incident. At the start of the year, after suffering a two-week-long DDoS attack, Linode announced a data breach with attackers accessing some user accounts. The company reset passwords after it detected the intrusions. Linode engineers told customers they were "experiencing a catastrophic DDoS attack which is being spread across hundreds of different IP addresses in rapid succession, making mitigation extremely difficult." The report adds: "During all this time, connectivity to the service was down, affecting Linode customers such as Clojars, a repository of open source Clojure libraries that relies on the Linode infrastructure."

"a repository of open source Clojure libraries that relies on the Linode infrastructure"

So these libraries are only available in one place? Haven't these guys heard of mirror sites? I know its easy to fool Joe ixpack into thinking The Cloud is some safe secure place and he never needs to worry about his data ever again (honest!) , but one would hope people involved in writing programming libraries would have a bit more common sense.

I think the point is that the internet is becoming less distributed. Everybody putting their web sites up on virtual machines in "the cloud" means that there are 2 or 3 entities who are responsible for a very large number of websites. Even if they use multiple datacenters, they are all interconnected in the case where if 1 fails, other datacenters can take over, but sometimes this has even more disasterous effects where a chain reaction [networkworld.com] takes down an even bigger part of the network.

If you're Canadian, maybe, otherwise no. Labor Day [wikipedia.org] is an American holiday which is not to be confused with the similarly-named Labour Day [wikipedia.org] that is observed in other countries. While they may celebrate roughly the same thing, they have separate histories and are (with the exception of Canada) held on completely different dates.

The attack was aimed at Linode's Atlanta data center, so we can safely assume that they were referring to the American holiday, not the Canadian holiday that takes place on the same day

Duh. Linode is one of the few hosting services that "helpfully" assigns systematic aliases (such as "linode1234.members.linode.com") to all virtual machines, basically providing a host lookup for hackers to easily target Linode hosts.